Because Real Love Stoops

The first time I slow danced with you my nose came up to your arm pit.

I know, because I made a joke about how I’d hoped you’d remembered to put on deodorant that day.

Your face had turned crimson, the red rising from your neck to your eyebrows, and you’d promised me that you’d applied a double dose that morning.

You were all decked out in that snazzy white suit and I was in my lacy peach dress. And even though my hair was ratted and poofed, you loomed tall that night beneath the shifting colors of the disco ball. We felt so grown up dancing the night away at the eighth-grade party, our friends circled around us in their fancy best. It was the last hoorah of middle school, and high school waited just beyond the bend of summer.

I had no idea, of course, that I was dancing with my future husband. I didn’t know that six years later we’d be dancing the night away beneath a canopy in your parent’s back yard, our shiny new wedding rings sparkling happy in the moonlight.

I had no idea that a few of those gangly boys dancing beside us in the middle school cafeteria would be singing our favorite tunes on a crackly karaoke machine one hot August eve in ’93. Or that our wedding party would break a sweat on that small wooden dance floor as they celebrated with us, just twenty-years young, on the first night of our married life. 

Even though we’d outgrown our junior high duds, you still towered above me on that night, too. But somehow it seemed only right that your new wife should fit snug beneath your arms. I love how you loomed large but never made me feel small, only treasured and secure in the fortress of your embrace.

I wrote it in my journal just days before we married- that real love stands tall in a world that spins and sways.

And though I still believe that love is a lofty and sacred gift, I wonder if I had it all wrong when we first began.

Because over the past twenty-and-a-half years, you’ve shown me that real love bends low.

Real love stoops to pick up the trash bag sitting near the kitchen door and real love crouches to look a sullen child in the eye.

Real love leans down to change diapers and to shovel snow. Real love squats behind prickly bushes during endless games of hide-and-seek and drops to the ground to pick daisy-lions in the yard.

Real love bends over the dish washer and over the puking child, and real love kneels in prayer day in and day out.

Real love doesn’t elevate self or tower in pride.

Real love chooses to be righteous instead of right; servant instead of master, humble instead of haughty.

And this morning, as I opened that children’s Bible in the midst of the breakfast mess and invited the kids to listen to the greatest love story ever on this Valentine’s day, I was reminded once again what a gift your real love is.

When Josh lay down his cereal spoon and cuddled in close to hear the story he knows so well, but never tires of; when Maggie made a cross with her index fingers and recited those familiar lines before I could even finish reading them, I knew that the real love you have shown us is taking root.

Our littlest girl said it with quiet reverence, those words from our beat-up Jesus Storybook Bible,and I felt my stomach quake with the wonder of it all—

 Jesus could have just climbed down from the cross.. but he stayed. And it wasn’t the nails that kept him there. It was love.

The realest love of all stooped the lowest.

The realest love bent beneath the suffocating weight of our sins and hung tall on a criminal’s cross.

Ludicrous love. Lavish love.

And I saw it in their eyes today, how our children understand just a little bit of that crazy real love because they have a Daddy who bows low, too.

A daddy who chases hard after our glorious-stooping Savior and looks a little more like Him every day.

And, today, I’m thankful that my heart fits beneath the shelter of yours. And I stand tall with gratitude for the gift that you are to me. To us. 

Happy Valentine’s Day, Rob.